Some of them have been completely awful; some really great. And until very recently, I thought I’d found my perfect top coat.

And then I tried Glisten & Glow HK Girl.

And I can now say with absolute certainty that I will never use another top coat again.

These are all the top coats that I have previously bought and tried:

No. 7 Stay Perfect

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Anti-Chip

Seche Vite

Essie Good To Go

Nina Ultra Pro

No. 17 Double Gloss Top Coat

W7 Diamond Top Coat

NYC Grand Central Station

Tip Perfection (not sure if that’s the brand or the polish name – it came with some Myleene Klass nail wraps)

I used to love No.7 Stay Perfect. It dries quickly and has a good shine.

Then I read about Seche Vite and bought a bottle or three. I loved how it dries even faster and is almost instantly touch-proof. But I hate how it often shrinks my polish and goes gloopy towards the end of the bottle. OK, so there’s Seche Restore, but it’s all a bit of a faff and more money spent too.

My longest-loved top coat has been Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Anti-Chip. It’s the top coat in the red bottle. It’s quick to dry and lovely and runny at first. But it too goes a little thick towards the end of the bottle and needs some polish thinner to keep it going.

The others on my list are nothing special. I know lots of people swear by Essie Good To Go, but I don’t like it much. It takes longer to dry than Seche Vite, Sally Hansen and No.7.

The same can be said for Nina Ultra Pro.

No.17 is quite good – fairly similar to No.7 really, although my bottle has yellowed a little.

The final three on my list – W7, NYC and Tip Perfection – all take an age to dry and are not worth buying when there are other, much better top coats to be had.

But, I’ve finally found my perfect top coat. I had been reading about it for months on US blogs. It’s called HK Girl and is by Glisten & Glow. It seemed really expensive to get it shipped from abroad, so I held off buying it, despite the glowing reviews I read. And then the Royal Mail started destroying inbound parcels of polish anyway, so I didn’t ever get around to buying it.

Glisten & Glow HK Girl top coat

Then, last month, Rainbow Connection began to stock it. I immediately snapped up four bottles and I will never look back.

HK Girl is the perfect top coat. It dries to the touch really quickly. It’s almost – but not quite – as quick as Seche Vite. I’d say it’s about 30 seconds slower, although I haven’t timed it exactly. And that’s acceptable to me. It’s certainly rock hard MUCH faster than Seche Vite, and it doesn’t shrink my polish. It’s beautifully shiny, and apparently – although I haven’t got that far yet – it doesn’t go gloopy at the end of a bottle. It’s wonderful and I absolutely love it.

The base coat has equally good reviews, but I’ve not bought it as yet.

I’m so glad I bought four bottles of the top coat. It costs from £6.55 from Rainbow Connection – but please don’t buy it all, as I’ll be back for more at some point!

I used PVA glue as a base coat for the first time yesterday. And it certainly gave the right results as far as easy removal of glitter is concerned. But, it did have its drawbacks.

Taking it off was really simple – and very satisfying for a picker like me. It just scraped off easily using my thumbnail. For most nails, it came off in one piece even.

But the very fact that it came off so easily was also one of its pitfalls. By just the next morning – and I only put the manicure on in the late afternoon of the day before – it was already lifting away from the nail on a couple of fingers.

So, my conclusion is that I will definitely use this method again, but only when I want to wear my manicure for a short time – perhaps for parties and special occasions, for example.

These are what was left after picking off my glitter manicure from yesterday – made nice and easy by using the PVA glue base coat

About me

I'm Claire Kerr and I'm a UK nails blogger. I've only been addicted to nail polish since 2012. Some kind of mid-life crisis turned me from a tomboy into a girly girl!

I had been posting pics of my manicures to Facebook, really as a way of documenting them for myself, but I was filling up my timeline with the photos and most of my friends weren't interested. So I started this blog instead!